This are more welcoming response than I usually get. Lots of numbers and graphs usually scare people away or cause them to zone out.
I've been preparing an updated version to a guide I posted to the /r/gamedev subreddit back in August 2013. The word count for the new guide is
92,725 words and 226 pages so far. I also want to post this guide to /r/gamedev. Other Kickstarter guides that I've read often are really generic advice and lack discussion in important areas of campaigns like how to properly price rewards step by step. What I'm doing is often just applying what can be learned in inventory management system courses. I just treat individual reward tiers like they are different models of car at a car dealership.
But the real question is... can we kickstarter them to write these amazing kickstarter analysis posts?
It won't be visually pretty or in physical print, but I don't feel the need to run a Kickstarter campaign for this specific incarnation of the guide. I'd have to increase the scope even further if I wanted to charge for it or start producing something like
Extra Credits videos to help visualize the material. I have considered Patreon as fit to expand my data collection to other categories on Kickstarter but I haven't looked seriously into that yet. Right now I'm limited to data for the video games category.
Here are some sneak-peaks at the material discussed in my guide.
One very useful thing to know is the number of backers a campaign should be targeting to reach 100% funded. There are multiple approaches to get this number using historical data. Remember I mentioned that for a $15 tier introducing a copy of the game, a healthy average is $20 to $31. In that situation a crude estimated range can be made by dividing the goal amount by $31 to get the lower number of backers and $20 to get the higher number of backers needed. There are more precise methods, but now there is at least something to work with.
Getting to 30% funded within the first week is one of the tipping points where the chances of getting funded become greater than the chances to fail. Taking 30% of the target number of backers to reach 100% now gives the project creator an objective for a minimum of how large of a fanbase and followers to build up before launching. For a small project below $10,000 it might even be acceptable to just wait until there is 15% the number of first-week backers ready to go because Kickstarter regulars may fill in the missing 15%.
Four categories can assist in decisions for how to arrange the content of reward tiers.
Reward content with fixed costs. The initial cost for many digital goods is only for the first time something is produced (I am ignoring support costs like monthly server bills). That is why it can be considered a fixed cost. Examples are digital art books, the music soundtrack and even the video game itself. After it is completed, the costs to the developer to make more digital copies can be insignificant (Ignoring having to buy keys for a closed garden platform like iOS). This reward content is great for lower tiers as project creators can supply as many digital copies as they need. I am strongly biased towards the idea that a the reward content with fixed costs should be used to try to strengthen the tiers few immediately following the tier that introduces a copy of the game. Some people are going to just find the soundtrack on YouTube later. Others are just going to wait until the game is in an indie bundle (But they may be willing to drop a dollar in now for a reward like being in the credits).
Reward content with real variable costs. This type will add to the overall cost each time something is produced. There are also initial costs such a creating the art that will go on a t-shirt. The variable cost for physical reward items like t-shirts goes down with larger orders from the t-shirt printing shop, so sometimes these rewards are better at the medium priced tiers that can popular enough to increase the order size for discounts.
Unique reward content that is not time expensive. I feel that many project creators are overlooking these rewards. Things such as having a backer's name included the game's end credits or entered into a pool for random NPC names can have an insignificant to low initial cost that happens each time this reward is individually fulfilled. These rewards are better for the low to medium priced tiers. They can be extremely easy thanks to the surveys that are sent out to backers after a project is funded. Kickstarter will produce a spreadsheet with the survey results. The column of backer names for the NPC name pool can be then exported to a
CSV file.
Unique reward content that is time expensive. Having a backer design a monster to be put into the game usually has a high initial cost that happens each time this reward is individually fulfilled. A team's artist may be delayed from working on other art assets. This content is better for the highest priced reward tiers. They can help cover a lot of funding distance. With
Steel Assault there was concern that some of the highest priced rewards, such as a custom NES ROM, weren't priced high enough to compensate for the time required.
Another useful thing is understanding that Kickstarter is less chaotic then it may appear at first. There are patterns in traffic data. There are also patterns in backer behaviours. Both can be used to try to improve a campaign's chances of getting funded. Being oblivious to those patterns can severely reduce those chances.
Aviary Attorney is a cherrypicked example because it will be easier to see what I am about to explain when there aren't large backers having a big impact on the numbers. What looks chaotic can actually have a lot of order beneath it.
First, look at its
daily numbers on Kicktraq. This is the information that most project creators have to work with, beyond the creator dashboard and e-mails, to monitor what is happening.
Next, look at my
graphs for Aviary Attorney. The "
Backers by tier over time" starts to show a much more predicatable story. Spreadsheet programs can generate trendlines for each individual reward tier. Where those tiers are expected to be in the future could be summed together. This means that a large outlier pledge that isn't expected to occur frequently won't be as much of a problem as it can be for tools like Kicktraq. The outlier pledge is isolated to its specific tier, while linear trends based on only the net changes in the overall number of backers and amount pledged are more vulnerable to being thrown off. Kicktraq is often overly optimistic in the early days because the big pledges are often concentrated in the first and last days of the campaign's run.
What I want people to then focus on more is the "
Percentage of the total backers by reward tier over time" graph. Notice how the £7 tier has stabilized at around 70% of backers selecting that tier. The other tiers also aren't shifting up of down in percentage too much relative to each other. I can describe this as discovering what specific numbers are carved into the faces of casino dice when this wasn't know before. A generalization is that each time someone new arrives at the project page it is like rolling the same dice again. An important concept is
The Law of Averages. Some outcomes have greater probability, such as how board game designers have to deal with
7 having the most options to be rolled for two traditional dice. Over time that law allows differences in probability to become visible. Backer behaviour can stabilize for campaigns when other factors like poor morale aren't big factors. When a campaign experiences increases or decreases in momentum, what is changing is how often per day the imaginary dice are being rolled, not how the outcomes are weighted.
Better campaign performance can result from efforts to manipulate how the outcomes of the imaginary dice are weighted. Creating urgency with a limited early-bird version of a medium priced tier may shift some backers higher than they initially planned. Weaknesses in how the rewards
up-sell can be spotted and smoothed out to shift more backers higher. Instead of 50% of backers at a $10 tier and 30% at the following $15 tier, a campaign can be modified to make the $15 tier more attractive so it becomes 45% at the $10 tier and 35% at the $15 tier to get just a little more funding distance out of some of the backers. The fixed cost reward tier content previously mentioned can be used to strengthen the flow of the reward tiers which is very important in the lower and medium priced tiers because that is where the majority of the backers on a healthy campaign will looking at tiers to pick.
Aviary Attorney was a small campaign. The
graphs for Thimbleweed Park is on the other end of the spectrum as it was a massive campaign instead of a tiny one. The percentage of backers at each tier doesn't wildly fluctuate relative to each other. A massive campaign has a lot of dice rolls. It is actually the medium sized campaigns where things can get more difficult for me. Different "pools" of backers, such as hardcore fans, can be rolling dice that are weighted a little higher. New reward tier additions can cause shifts in which tiers get selected. In the final days on a struggling campaign a lot of backers can upgrade their pledges if there is still hope causing a shift in the percentages that is harder to anticipate.
A note is that for the "
Pledges per day" graphs on Kicktraq, another way to look them is as stacked bar charts that were just completely filled in with the same blue. If the individual allocated pledge tallies per reward tier were shown, then those blue bars could be composed of stacked segments similar to how the stacked bar charts look in the
graphs for Creepy Castle. A $50 bar on Kicktraq may be visibly composed of a $40 backer and a $10 backer.
An interesting article appeared recently called
Kickstarter Won't Fund Your Indie Video Game - Here's Why Game Developers Are Using It Anyway.
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